So what was last week – specifically Monday and Tuesday afternoon all about?
That big value-erasing fall on Monday, (more than $34 billion off the value of the market) and the nasty slide late Tuesday after the session has started confidently in the morning – left the impression that another big slide was around the corner.
But the market ended with three days of gains, including Friday’s big surge.
The market still ended the week in the red, but the drop of less than 1% looked a lot better than the 2.2% slump on Monday. This week won’t see any real moves until Wednesday when the bank of Japan, and then the US Fed reveal their latest monetary policy decisions.
Those decisions could make late Wednesday, Thursday and Friday days of volatile trading, or a cruise towards the next blip.
Overall, the local market added $20 billion to the vale of the local market with those gains from Wednesday to Friday.
The S&P/ASX200 and the All Ordinaries both finished Friday up 1% and both closed the week down 0.8% to 5296.7 points and 5396.7 points, respectively.
Today the futures market is showing little gain and the ASX 200 will start flat to perhaps a touch weaker.
Unlike the Australian market, the US share market rose 0.5% over the past week to recover some of its loss from the previous week.
But other major share markets fell. Eurozone shares fell 3.1% (not helped by the $US14 billion US Dept of Justice claim against Deutsche Bank), Japanese shares fell 2.6% and Chinese shares lost 2.4%.
Bond yields were little changed but rose sharply in Australia. Commodity prices were mixed with oil down 6% on supply concerns and sugar up 3.8%. The $A fell, closing below $US0.75, to end down 2 cents over the week.
Friday saw our market up 1%, but eurozone shares lost 1%, and the US S&P 500 declined 0.4%, Germany fell 1.5% and the Italian market shed well over 2%.Tokyo lost 0.7%, Hong Kong and Shanghai both lost just over 0.6%.
Oil prices fell, the $US rose and America’s August consumer price inflation came in slightly stronger than expected.
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 index eased 8.10 points, or 0.4%, to close at 2,139.16 for a weekly gain of 0.5%.
The Dow dropped 88.68 points, or 0.5%, to end at 18,123.80, and added 0.2% on the week.
And the Nasdaq fell 5.12 points, or 0.1%, to close at 5,244.57 but had a very solid weekly gain of 2.3%.
Apple shares slid 0.6% ending a four-day advance that propelled it 12% higher.
Apple’s 11.4% weekly jump is also its largest since October 2011, figures from market data group, FactSet showed. Stocks will struggle for direction ahead of the meetings of the Bank of Japan and the Fed on Wednesday.
